


The Ghost of the Wood

by GloriaMundi



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Gen, Gift Fic, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:24:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the wood gives something back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [novembersmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/novembersmith/gifts).



The wood in winter flickers with an eerie bleak light. Shadows form faces in the fall of slanted sunlight on frost-gilded bark. The silence breeds echoes, fragments of song and laughter, purer and sweeter than anything human: or is it birdsong, the shivery trill of a solitary blackbird unseen in the leafless branches?

Ice rattles in the reeds, hides the sluggish black stream from sight, hides the secrets that lie beneath the water: coins, Coke cans, rosaries, single shoes, brooches, bones. Centuries lie hidden, dreaming, in the darkening wood.

But sometimes the wood gives something back ...


	2. Monday

"Your man's got himself in a bit of trouble, Cassie," Quigley told me. "Some Jane Doe shows up on the hard shoulder, right? Down the motorway, out past Stillorgan. Soaking wet, in this brass-monkey weather: not dressed for it either. Says her name's Germaine Rowan and she just wants to go home."

"What's that to do with Sam?" I said, swerving to avoid a wankstain with a Range Rover who'd decided he wanted to go to Cork after all and didn't care who he cut up to do it..

"Turns out," said Quigley with undisguised glee, "she knows him, from way back. 'Oooh, Sam,'" he falsettoed, "'have you come to fetch me back again? I din't mean to run, honest I din't'."

"Shit," I said.

"Doesn't look good, Cassie. Doesn't look too good for your man."

"So let me get this straight," I said, "This girl -- this woman -- shows up out of nowhere, says she's been missing for a long time, she's been kept locked up somewhere, but now she's free and she'd like to be getting on home: and then says hey, hello, how are ye to _Sam_?"

I didn't believe for a moment that my husband been keeping some fancy bit on the side: for one thing, we were too busy. When would he find the time to have an affair? But there was something nagging at me about all of this: which was why I was crawling up the R118, trying to get to Sam before the rumour mill started grinding away at him.

"And _you_ know who Germaine Rowan is, don't you?" Quigley was sly now. "What with you partnering with Ryan an' all."

I wanted to say I'd never heard of her: wanted to rip Quigley a new one for reminding me of Rob. (Short version: he was my shieldmate and soulmate, knew me better than anyone – even Sam – but I gave him what he wanted and he couldn't take it and we fell apart.) But Rob's name was what brought the pieces into alignment, so I could make sense of the picture.

"Jamie," I said. "Jamie, who was lost in the woods."

* * *

I should have known that Sam would be in with O’Kelly, who (not unreasonably) wanted to know why a long-lost, presumed-dead woman claimed familiarity with him. “They’ll be a while,” Quigley said, with a smirk that I wanted to slap off his face. “Why don’t you have a watch of our woman’s interview?”

The thing that struck me first, in the video, was that Forensics had done a brilliant job on the age-progressed photos –"Twenty-five years on: how would lost Knocknaree children look now?" – of Jamie Rowan. She didn't much resemble her mother (who I'd talked with during Operation Vestal, seven years ago, when we'd been trying to find the killer of another little girl; who probably still kept Jamie's room as it'd been the day she didn't come home), but she was the spit of the pictures in the papers. Her hair was darker than it'd been when she was twelve, but her eyes... they were more gold than hazel, in the cold light of the interview room.

She was sipping coffee, or what passes for it in the interview suite: both hands round the cup as though she was drawing its warmth into her. Her fingernails were unpainted, gnawed to the quicks. Someone'd found her some dry clothes: pink tracksuit bottoms and a UCD sweatshirt. She looked like a schoolgirl, but she had to be around Rob's age.

I pressed Rewind.

"I don't really remember much," she was saying. "I ... I don't really want to remember, y'know? It was ..." She ducked her head over her coffee cup, eyes glistening.

"Were you assaulted, love?" said Detective Conway gently. "If you were, you don't have to talk about it, but maybe we can stop him doing it to anyone else."

"I – no, it wasn't ..." she began.

Then the door opened and Sam stuck his head round. "Detective, can I borrow you –"

I saw her head go up, like a hunting hound scenting prey: or like the family dog hearing familiar footsteps, keys in the door. She hadn't much of an expression up to then – nervous, shy, barely responding except to nod thanks for the coffee – but when she smiled it transformed her.

"Sam!"

This time I didn't focus on Sam (who was frowning, like a man trying to place a face: and like all detectives, he's got a fearsome memory for faces). I focussed on Jamie.

She didn't like it that he didn't know her. "Sam," she said again, more tentatively. "Have you come to fetch me back again? 'Cause I didn't mean to run. I just wanted to ..." She fell silent in the face of Sam's silence: bowed her head again, and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

Rewind. She hadn't been crying a moment before.

Sam stood still, only that little muscle on his neck twitching. Jamie glanced up, as though hoping for a different response, and I saw her notice the twitch. She reminded me of someone, but I couldn't think who it might be. Not her mother, Alicia, or her father, a respectable married Dublin solicitor who'd never met his daughter. She didn't even remind me, really, of the photos of the child she'd been that long-ago summer. But she reminded me of someone, all right. Something about those golden eyes …

"Sam," she was saying, on the tape, "don't you know me? It's Jamie. _You_ know." And she looked at him with such pleading, such hunger, that my stomach roiled.

* * *

It was gone six by the time we made it home. By silent consent, we hadn’t talked about Jamie Rowan in the car: but as soon as our front door had closed us away from the rest of the world, Sam said fiercely “I swear I've never seen her before in my life, Cass. Cross my heart." Then at something in my expression – I was thinking of Rob again, and all that he'd lost when he turned his back on being Adam, the childhood memories and the childhood friends – he drew back a little, frowning. "Cassie. Do you not trust me?"

"I do," I said. "Of course I do." And it wasn't even a lie. "It's. If that's Jamie -- Germaine Rowan -- then." I swallowed. "Someone has to tell her mother."

"Jesus God," said Sam. "She's still -- no, she had Jamie when she was a teenager, didn't she?"

Seventeen and single, I didn't say. She'd been barely thirty when I spoke to her. "She still lives in Knocknaree. Still hopes Jamie'll come wandering home one day."

"And if someone tells her, we'd best let Rob know," said Sam, who had been there during Operation Vestal, when Rob and I fell apart.

I turned away, staring out of the window towards the invisible sea. Sometimes I missed my old flat, with its wrought-iron fireplace and its view of Sandymount beach, with a pain like broken bones. Sometimes I was glad to be away from that room and all the sweet sad memories it held. Right now I yearned to be back there with Rob and Sam, the way it used to be, hot whiskey and pizza and tearing holes in one another's theories about who'd murdered little Katy Devlin.

I didn't want to think about Rob right now. I didn't want to think about why Rob's long-lost childhood friend, missing these twenty years and more, should swan back into the world and demand my husband's attention.

"Sam," I said, "d'you think our Jane Doe's really Jamie? After all this time?"

Sam sat down heavily on the couch, elbows on his knees. "I don't know," he said to the carpet. "Sure, it looks like her -- well, enough like she might look now. And Missing Persons say she doesn't fit any recent cases."

"You know as well as I do that looks aren't everything," I said. A while back, when I'd worked in Undercover, I'd taken on the persona of a murdered girl, Lexie Madison -- a role that only I could have played, because she was the spit of the face I saw in the mirror. That didn’t mean I _was_ Lexie: but sometimes, the line between us had blurred. "She might only look like Jamie Rowan would. Hell, she could be Jamie's half-sister."

"You think her da went catting around again? After one illegitimate child?"

I shrugged. "Makes more sense to me than Jamie Rowan floating in on the wind and claiming she doesn't know what happened to her."

"They never found a body."

"There was all the blood in ... in Rob's shoes."

Sam looked at me, and the softness in his eyes was almost enough to stop me turning over Jamie's tale. Almost.

"Rob Ryan's working out of an office in Inchicore," Sam said. "You know he set up as a private investigator, yeah? I've his number somewhere. Do ... will I tell him the news, then?"

I haven't spoken to Rob in years. Sam, on the other hand, hates to let a quarrel fester. (He and I have never discussed what happened between me and Rob: that's how come he thinks it merely a quarrel.) He catches up with Rob every few months over a beer. I have no idea what they talk about, those nights. I hope it's not me.

"Please," I said. "And I think I'd like to pay a call on Alicia Rowan." Even saying her name made the room seem darker. A mother who's mourned a child for so long, and then meets that child again ... she'd hate me for the questions I'd have to ask. Is this your daughter? Are you sure? Are you sure, beyond reasonable doubt?

Though someone else'd be asking those questions: it wasn't Murder's case, because it wasn't a murder. The opposite of murder: a dead girl resurrected, for all intents and purposes.

"And if it's not Jamie?" said Sam. "That Jane Doe is somebody. She didn't spin herself together out of twigs and leaves and old crisp packets. She's somebody's daughter, somebody's lover, maybe somebody's mother."

"If she's not Jamie Rowan," I said, "then she can damned well tell us who she is."


	3. Wednesday

I waited for Rob and Sam in the coffee shop across from Dublin Castle. Big, anonymous place, amateur watercolours of famous Dublin scenes all over the walls, full of tourists even in November: neutral ground. You couldn't see my hands shaking when I picked up my coffee cup.

"Hey, Cassie," said Sam. His expression was complicated, but I couldn't tell what he was trying to convey to me without words.

Rob, behind him, looked older -- well, of course he looked older: it was nearly seven years since I'd seen him. But the spark, I thought, had gone out of him, the fire that burnt in us both when we were young and reckless and making our names in Murder. He'd always been well turned-out, but now the fancy clothes were threadbare, carefully mended. There was grey in his dark blond hair, and lines around his eyes that hadn't been there before. He'd grown a beard, which I wanted to mock. Didn't matter. I could still read _his_ expression as if he'd spoken. He was scared.

"Cassie," he said softly, and the sound of his ridiculous English accent -- they'd sent him away to boarding school, after -- made me taste smoke and whiskey. "How've you been?"

"Good enough," I said. "You're looking well, Rob. Good on you for getting out when you did."

"Ah, there was nothing left for me here," said Rob.

Everything I thought of saying tasted like broken glass on my tongue. "Is it her?"

"I," began Rob.

"Can I get youse coffee? Tea?" said the waitress brightly -- hell of a lot more brightly than she'd been when it was just me. But Sam and Rob are both easy on the eyes, in very different ways: stocky blond Sam and Rob with his elegant good looks. She probably thought they could do better than me.

"I don't know, Cassie," said Rob, once we'd sent her on her way with an order for three coffees. "It could be, sure." His accent was less English now, more the Dublin brogue of his childhood: stress. "We were talking about. About what happened. In the wood. She says they were running, and they looked behind them to see was I there, and then they looked again and I wasn't."

"Did she say where she's been since then?" asked Sam. "Because I don't know what you heard about it, but I never have met her in my life."

Rob stared at Sam as though he'd never seen Sam before, either. "She kept talking about the castle, and the statues, and the fine ladies, and the feasting. And how she had to leave Peter behind." 

Sam and I exchanged a look. She hadn't said anything of _that_ during her first interview. I said, "Was there anything she said, anything she did, that made you sure it was Jamie?"

Rob scowled. "I don't know. I don't remember much about ... about Knocknaree."

There was a small, taut silence: the waitress broke it, bringing our coffee, and I could see the tension come out of Rob's shoulders, a little.

"Well," said Sam diffidently. "I'm away back to the Castle: O'Kelly wants to tear me a new one about my secret love nest." His tone robbed the words of any lightness. "The two of you'll have a lot to be catching up on."

Rob and I looked at one another, and there - _there_ was that spark, that shared wavelength, that harmony. We were shit-scared of spending another minute together, there in that busy city-centre cafe with the piped music and the watercolours on the walls, without Sam to soften the edges.

"No," I said, scrabbling under my chair for my bag. "I'll just -"

"Maddox and I are off to Knocknaree," said Rob.

Sam and I both gaped at him. He might as well have said we were off to see the fairies.

"I want to talk to Jamie's mum," said Rob. There was something terrible in his eyes. "I want her to tell me that is truly her daughter, come home at last."

* * *

The motorway had changed Knocknaree. How could it not? The ancient wood was gone, the Bronze Age altar hauled away to some museum, the ruined keep isolate on a traffic island. The river had been channelled into a culvert under four lanes of traffic. Bland concrete industrial units had sprung up on either side of the new road. Their 'to let' signs were flashes of colour in the grey November light.

It was a hell of a lot quicker to get there, these days.

Knocknaree itself -- the estate, where Rob had grown up with Peter and Jamie, and the Devlins had tried to make a nice middle-class family life and pretend there wasn't a cuckoo in their midst -- persisted, stubbornly, like a fighter who won't stay down. The estate wall was higher now, to stop the kiddies playing chicken on the motorway, but I'd bet they still found their way over it. There was graffiti on the wall of the keep, between the ropes of ivy, but we were going too fast (Rob was driving) for me to read it.

Instead I mentally reviewed my research. The Devlins had moved away from Knocknaree after their daughter Katy was killed. Rosalind had a second-class degree in music theory: I was waiting for a call from Jonathan, her father, the only person who might to tell me what she was up to now. Jessica, Katy's twin, was safe and happy with her auntie in Athlone. The Savages - Peter's family - had given up on Knocknaree when the motorway came in and the wood had been chopped down: they'd sold up and bought a house in Cork. And the Ryans, Rob's parents, lived over in Leixlip. (I'd had a standing invitation for Sunday lunch, before Rob and I imploded.) Which left Alicia Rowan, whose only daughter had come home after twenty-seven years.

Ms Rowan took one look at us and her face set. I saw her thinking about slamming the door on us. "You're Adam Ryan," she said to Rob.

"Yes," said Rob. "I'm sorry, Ms Rowan."

"Well," said Alicia. "Jamie's back."

"She's here?" I said.

"No, they're still …" Her long, slender hands gestured vaguely. "Up at the Castle. Tests, they said. You'd better come inside."

Alicia Rowan's house had barely changed these seven years, or the twenty before: I suppose she wanted it to be familiar to Jamie, if Jamie ever returned. The smell of sandalwood and camomile still infused the air: there were the same hand-woven throws draped over every bit of furniture, and the same jade Buddha smiling up at us. "You've seen her?" I asked carefully, once we were settled on the sofa with some foul-smelling herbal tea.

"Yes," said Alicia. "I've seen her."

"Ms Rowan," asked Rob gently, "do you think it's truly Jamie?"

Alicia sipped her tea. She was staring into space: no, staring at the photos on the mantelpiece. Jamie sitting on a wall, laughing, with the wood behind her. Jamie and Peter and Adam - Rob - with Christmas-cracker paper crowns on their heads. Jamie dressed up in a white frock, scowling, for her First Communion.

"It looks - she looks like Jamie might, if she were all grown up," said Alicia slowly. "She threw her arms around me and cried and called me Mum."

This was the pivot, the moment that would turn the case (when had I started thinking of it as a case?) on one path or another. I knew better than to say anything in that moment, and I shoved my knee hard against Rob's to keep him silent.

"It's Jamie, but it's not," said Alicia at last. "It's as though someone took my daughter, and scooped everything out, and filled her up with ... I don't know. Something else. Maybe it was one of those cults." She clutched at her silver pendant, and made a high hurt sound that might have been laughter if it hadn't been teetering on the brink of hysteria. "Or maybe, maybe old Mrs Fitzgerald was right, and the faeries took her away."


	4. Thursday

I remembered Mrs Fitzgerald from Operation Vestal: she'd been the one who told us about Jonathan Devlin and his mates, all the while force-feeding me her home-made fruit scones. I loathe scones. By some miracle, she was still alive: somewhere in her nineties, completely blind, living in a nursing home in Stillorgan. It seemed like a pleasant enough place to wait for death.

"Ah, no, 'twasn't myself who thought it was the fairies," she said, once we'd got her settled with a good strong cup of tea, and gathered round her, Sam and Rob and me, like the children she didn't have, who never visited. There were envious looks from some of the other residents. "That was my mammy, God rest her. She thought it was the pooka took those poor wee dotes."

"The _pooka_?" I said. I'd had pretty much the same reaction when she'd told us that seven years ago. The pooka is a legend, a fearsome monster who'll steal children and lure travellers to their death.

"Penny for the pooka," said Sam: then, when Rob looked at him askance, "sure, it's just what we used to say, Halloween, back in Galway. Like trick-or-treating, but we never minded if they wouldn't give us anything."

"Give the pooka a penny and you'll be paying the rest of your life," said Mrs Fitzgerald with satisfaction. "My mammy was awful fond of the old tales, so she was. Sure, those children went in the river: 'twasn't the pooka who took them. Though, you know, if it had been twenty years later …"

She trailed off, her blind eyes fixed on something in another time.

"What d'you mean, Mrs Fitzgerald?" I said. "Twenty years later?"

"That Devlin girl," said Mrs Fitzgerald.

"Katy?" said Rob. "The little girl who was a dancer?"

"No, not the dancer," said Mrs Fitzgerald. "The elder one. Do you know, love, their father said to me once - it was just before they left, I remember it well - that she was no daughter of his."

"Jonathan Devlin said Rosalind wasn't his daughter?" asked Sam. Of the three of us, he was the only one who hadn't been ripped to shreds by Operation Vestal. I saw Rob sit back, ceding the interview to my husband.

"Aye," said Mrs Fitzgerald. "Said she was no get of his: she was a fetch from the wood, sent to punish him for some wicked thing he'd done there with those other lads. _She'd_ have taken that poor wee girl, quick as spitting. Mind you, I'd never have said that Margaret Devlin was the sort to pass off another man's babbie onto anyone."

"If she was a fetch," said Rob, very quickly as though to get the words out before his common sense caught up with his tongue, "how would they … send her away?"

"Holy water," said Mrs Fitzgerald, coughing. "Cold iron. Find who … made … "

She was coughing more violently now - choking, really - and one of the staff came over and wrestled her more upright and thumped her on the back and told us with a look that it was time we left.

* * *

We were all quiet in the car going back into town. I was driving, because that way I had more reason not to speak to Rob. I wanted some space to turn everything over in my mind. I'd tagged Rosalind as a textbook psychopath, more or less from the first time we met, certainly as soon as I'd realised how she was working Rob: but that was before I'd gone toe to toe with her.

I didn't like to think about that September morning she and I walked around the Knocknaree estate, me channelling all my rage and grief at losing Rob into an Oscar-worthy pretence of wanting Rosalind to keep my secrets. Rosalind had played me, played with me like a cat with a mouse: no, like something wilder with something soft and sweet. And when she realised that I'd outwitted her - that I'd been wired and monitored, that her gleeful account of persuading Damien Donnelly to murder Katy had been heard by a vanload of techs and detectives - I'd seen...

What had I seen?

Sam broke the silence. "D'you think we could talk to Jessica Devlin?"

"You won't get much out of her," said Rob from the back seat. I flicked a glance at him in the rear-view mirror, and met his eyes: he'd been staring at me. I looked back at the road. "Whatever Rosalind did to her," and there, that was the venom, the hatred, the disgust that I'd felt myself, "there's not much of a person left. I'd think she's in sheltered housing now, or in a home."

"I wish Jonathan Devlin would return my calls," I said. "He knows what Rosalind is."

"What about Jamie?" demanded Sam. "Are youse forgetting there's a grown woman up at the Castle - or no, they might've sent her home now - who's blown back in from wherever she went for twenty-seven years? Who greeted me like a long-lost friend -"

"She greeted you like a lover, actually," I said. "No, Sam, I know you weren't … I know you'd nothing to do with her. But you're right, love: _that's_ what we're trying to untangle. Not bloody Rosalind Devlin and what she's done to her family."

"What if it was Rosalind?" said Rob.

"What?" Sam twisted round to look at Rob.

"What if it was Rosalind who brought … brought Jamie back?" Rob was flushed, angry: he stared back at Sam defiantly.

"Why would she do that?" I said: but even as I said the words I knew.

"She's the kind to hold a grudge," said Sam. "I'll bet she never forgave you for getting the better of her. And what better way to get her revenge than breaking us up, the two of us?"

This time I met and held Rob's reflected gaze in the mirror. That was what she'd done to Rob and me, seven years ago.

"The little bitch," summarised Sam.


	5. Friday

Jonathan Devlin finally returned my call on Friday morning. "Rosalind's up to something," he said, once I'd filled him in on Jamie's return and hinted that Rosalind's name had come up in 'routine investigations'. "You know how she is, Detective Maddox. I've tried to keep her here at home with me, but …"

"She's not there?" 

"She's not been well lately," said Devlin. "Weak and exhausted, like all the life was draining out of her. I thought … well. But yesterday she was back to her old self, so sudden that I wonder if she'd been lying all along. I'm not saying she's got anything to do with that lass coming home at last: but I'm not saying it's impossible, either."

Sam had been in with O'Kelly again - Jamie Rowan had been interviewed again before being released into her mother's care last night, and there was a whole new set of veiled accusations, improbable coincidences and nonsensical assertions ("Peter wouldn't come back, he likes the hunting too well") to disentangle. But when he emerged to find me staring blindly out of the window, he took charge immediately. "I've called Rob," he said. "He'll pick us up outside."

"Where are we going?" I said, but I already knew.

* * *

The atmosphere in Alicia Rowan's house was thick enough to slice with a knife. Jamie, it turned out, wasn't home. "She's gone for a walk," Alicia told us. "She said she wanted to try to remember what it was like, growing up here."

"She won't find much that's stayed the same," said Rob. "Not since the motorway. Not now the wood's gone."

"I suppose you wouldn't," said Alicia, with the slightest possible weight on 'you'. "Still: it's where she lived her whole life, until ..."

"Is she … more herself, now?" I asked. "Before, you said she seemed strange."

"I don't know," said Alicia. She looked much older than she had a few days ago, as though she hadn't slept, as though she'd kept that same high pitch of alertness, watching Jamie every moment that she could. "I honestly don't know."

"I'd like to talk to her," said Sam. "I don't know if they told you, Ms Rowan: I'm the one she recognised, just after she was found, but I can't for the life of me think how. I never met her."

Alicia Rowan pushed her hair back from her face and gave Sam a long, hard look. "Ordinarily," she said, "I'd be telling you to get out of my house, if you'd anything at all to do with … with what happened. But … "

"Has she told you anything about where she was?" I said.

Alicia shook her head. "She just said she didn't want to think about it, much less 'inflict it all on me'. Those are her words, not mine."

"So she hasn't told you about, oh, being kept in some fairytale palace, and dancing all night in silk and satin?" said Rob. "Because that's the tale she told me, and I have to say it didn't sound one bit like the Jamie I … I knew."

Alicia switched her stare to Rob, and I could see him falter a little: because, after all, he'd been her daughter's childhood friend, and he'd come home when Peter and Jamie hadn't. "She has not," she said.

"Might I make us all a cup of tea, Ms Rowan?" I said meekly.

"I'm so sorry: where are my manners?"

I wanted to say, _your daughter, or whatever came home in her place, gobbled them up_. "Please don't worry. It's not as though it's a situation you could ever be prepared for." Never mind that she'd been hoping for it these last twenty years.

I let her lead me into the kitchen, where (predictably) she turned on me. "Why are you here?" she said angrily, voice pitched halfway between a whisper and a shriek. "Why do you keep asking if she's really Jamie?"

"This is going to sound crazy," I said, looking around at the neat kitchen - herbs drying in bunches, a stained-glass suncatcher in the window, a stack of bright-boxed Celestial Seasonings teas by the kettle - "but we do think there's something not right, here, and -"

"You think she's not human," said Alicia Rowan. "You think she's some kind of changeling, some … some _thing_ the Fair Folk sent to me."

I stared at her. I hadn't even put that into words in the privacy of my mind. It _did_ sound crazy, and under other circumstances I'd have talked her down with my best soothing manner, then gone away and laughed about it. I didn't want to think about what O'Kelly would say if I wrote this up in a report. But then, I didn't have to write any reports. This wasn't a murder case. This wasn't work. This was simply something that needed to be set right.

"I'm sorry," said Alicia, with a false hiccup of a laugh. "Now I'm the one who's sounding crazy. Ignore me, Detective. I've been waiting so long for her to come back, I think it's turned my mind."

"If you're crazy," I said, "so am I. And so are Sam and Rob."

"She hates this necklace," said Alicia, apparently at random. She was fingering the heavy pendant at her throat: turquoise and silver, typical hippie tat, a backpacker souvenir if Alicia'd ever escaped Knocknaree. "Says I shouldn't wear it. But it's always brought me luck. Protection. It's blessed, you know. By Buddhist priests."

"You think it's … protecting you from her?"

Alicia didn't answer: she swallowed and looked away. 

"If you're right - if _we're_ right - that makes perfect sense, Ms Rowan," I said firmly. "If she's not -"

"There's a tea," said Alicia, choked between shame and defiance. "Iron Buddha tea, they call it. Ti Kuan Yin. They say it'll drive out evil spirits."

"Do you want to drive her out?" I asked. "If she's not -"

"Ssshhh!" said Alicia: and a moment later I heard the front door open and slam closed, and Jamie's voice like a bell saying "Mam, I'm - Adam! It's been … Are you one of them too, like Sam?"

Alicia met my eyes. "You go out to them," she said. "I'll make the tea."

"Jamie, can you tell me where you remember me from?" Sam was saying. He'd picked the armchair to sit in, presumably in the hope of maintaining his personal space, but Jamie was perched on the arm of it. She looked less like her mother than ever, vivacious and sparkling. "Because," Sam went on doggedly, "I'm sure I'd remember meeting you."

"Oh, you!" Tinkling laughter and a playful pat: watching them, I was reminded of nothing so much as a cat pawing its prey in hope of a twitch. "You came to the house quite often, didn't you?"

"Which house is this, Jamie?" Rob, on the sofa, sounded quite calm, but his eyes were agonised. "The house where you were kept captive all these years - you know, the one you said you don't know where it is - or the fine palace in the woods, with the lords and ladies dancing?"

"We left you behind," said Jamie clearly, "because you were too slow. Don't be slow, Adam."

I couldn't bear the look on Rob's face. "Hi," I said brightly, inserting myself between Jamie and Rob, perching on the arm of the sofa to mirror Jamie's position. "We haven't met, I don't think. I'm Cassie, Sam's wife."

Jamie looked at me with those golden eyes - were they reflecting back the low slanting sunlight, like an animal's? - and laughed. "Of course you are," she said.

"I've made some tea," said Alicia, coming into the room with a laden tray. "Here you are, Jamie: this one's new, but I think you'll like it."

"Thanks, mam," said Jamie, with a sweet grateful smile, and the look on Alicia's face - hungry and miserable - was as bad as the look on Rob's when Jamie'd said he was too slow.

"Rosehip for you, Detective," said Alicia weakly, passing me a cup full of steaming red liquid that looked for a moment like blood. "And peppermint for you, Detective O'Neill: I wasn't sure what you would like. And for you, Adam - I beg your pardon, Mr Ryan - there's camomile. You always used to say you liked the smell."

Rob looked green and ill, but he took the cup from her and sipped at it.

"Mam, this is _foul_!" said Jamie suddenly. She lurched to her feet and set her cup down with such force that the tea slopped on the coffee table and splashed the jade Buddha. "It's burning me!"

I reached over and picked up the cup, took a sip. "Tastes fine to me," I said, though in fact it tasted of dead leaves and wet winter woodland.

"It tastes _foul_ ," said Jamie again, and whirled round to snarl at her mother, "you _poisoned_ me!"

"Why on earth would you say that, darling?" said Alicia. She was stark white, and she sounded as though she was choking on something. "Would I poison my own daughter?"

"That isn't your daughter, Ms Rowan," said Sam quietly. "Only look at her. _See_ her."

We were all staring at Jamie. One of us (Rob, maybe, or Alicia) gasped. I saw Sam crossing himself: and I saw Jamie, or the bony fanged thing that had played at being Jamie, flinch away from the gesture.

"Who sent you here?" I demanded.

"Where did you come from? How do we send you back?" said Rob.

"I can't go back!" not-Jamie wailed, its voice nothing like a human woman's any more. "She'll unmake me!"

"Who's 'she'?" asked Sam. "The cat's mother?"

The front door opened again. "Certainly not," said a light, amused voice, and the hair on the back of my neck sprang proud. It was Rosalind Devlin, or the thing that went by that name. I'd outwitted her once, but she'd been only seventeen during Operation Vestal. She was seven years older, seven years more cunning. Though I wasn't sure that Rosalind Devlin had ever been young.

"Rosalind?" said Rob. "What the _hell_ -"

"How lovely it is to see you again, Detective," said Rosalind. She stood there, perfectly groomed, in her nice trouser suit, and smiled around at us all. "Oh, but I'm sorry." One hand to her mouth, the picture of remorse. "I forgot: you're not a detective any more, are you? Something about failure to disclose evidence?"

"What _is_ that … that creature?" said Alicia Rowan, gesturing. In the corner, not-Jamie was crouching and whimpering, clearly terrified of Rosalind. I knew the feeling.

"Just leaves and twigs," said Rosalind airily. "Just a fetch. _You_ know, Cassie: you'd a fetch of your own, did you not?" She watched me, calculating and cruel. "Or was it you that was the fetch? I laughed, you know, when I saw the photographs of you dead on the front page of the news. Until I realised you -- Detective Maddox -- you were still alive."

I couldn't say I'd never thought it -- that when Frank Mackey and I made Lexie Madison, it took something from us both. That what it took from me was my reality. Lexie had been realler than I was. Perhaps I was just twigs and leaves shaped to look like a woman. Sam had rescued me from that. But I hadn't got around to rescuing myself until now, watching the creature in the corner tremble and sob, and knowing that I was nothing like her.

Like _it_.

"How does it feel, Detective O'Neill - may I call you Sam? How does it feel, Sam, to be married to someone who's still in love with a man she hasn't seen for seven years?"

"Jesus God," muttered Sam. (Rosalind and the fetch both flinched, that time.) "Why did you do it, Rosalind? Why pick a dead girl -"

Alicia cut Sam off with a sharp gesture. "Is she, is Jamie alive? Is that - do you know where she is?"

"If I did," said Rosalind, with a little laugh, "why should I tell _you_?"

Alicia let out a wordless howl of fury and lunged at Rosalind. She must have taken her by surprise: I remembered, now, the insane animal strength with which Rosalind had fought me, when I arrested her. And I remembered my sense, even then, that there was something unnatural about her. Something in the way she smelt, or moved, or breathed: nothing I could have described to anybody else.

Even surprised, Rosalind was a formidable foe. She swiped at Alicia's face with a clawed hand, leaving four red weals across her cheek: but then, grabbing at Alicia's throat, she screamed and recoiled, hunching over her own hand as though she'd been burnt.

"You evil bitch!" cried Alicia. The chain of her Buddhist-blessed pendant had broken when Rosalind pulled at it: now she held the pendant up, wild-eyed, and brandished it at Rosalind. ("Holy water," I remembered old Mrs Fitzgerald saying. "Cold iron." What she'd meant all along was _belief_. And Alicia believed in the blessing on that chunk of silver.) "How _dare_ you?" And Rosalind, whimpering, stumbled back; caught her foot in the rug; and went sprawling gracelessly over the coffee table, cups flying everywhere, with a terrible crash.

There was a moment, infinitely long, when nobody moved or spoke. Even the changeling was silent at last, curling further into itself until it was nothing more than a rounded heap of twigs and rubbish.

Then Rosalind said, in a voice that was unlike anything I had heard before, "You can't drive me out. I've nowhere to go." Her face was turned away from me, towards the jade Buddha: I couldn't see her expression.

"Not another sob story," I said icily. "Don't you see, Rosalind? Your lies won't work on any of us. You've burnt us all before."

Alicia, on her knees, had shuffled backwards away from the coffee table until her back was against the wall. Her face was streaked with tears: her skirt was hitched up around her thighs. "Go back where you came from!" she said. "And take that, that _thing_ with you!"

Rosalind said nothing. I could hear spilt tea dripping onto the carpet.

"The wood's gone," said Sam softly. "You can't go back to the wood."

"The wood remains," said Rosalind in that high staticky voice. "Just not _here_. But I can't reach it anymore."

In the corner, the pile of leaves and twigs crackled and settled. It no longer resembled a human figure. Come to that, there was something inhuman about Rosalind's sprawl. I realised that the liquid spilling over the coffee table and onto the floor was too thick, too red, to be tea.

"Rosalind," I said urgently. "Rosalind, look at me."

I could hear something crackling as she turned her head, with effort, to meet my gaze. There was blood, a lot of it: her head must have caught the corner of the table as she fell. Scalp wounds bleed like a bitch, though: it might be nothing much, under the mess. "Are you happy now?" she said to me.

Whatever this woman had done to me, to Rob, to Alicia, I was still a police officer, sworn to serve: and she was, in that moment, no more than an injured person who needed my help, even if I couldn't summon the sympathy I'd usually feel for someone - anyone - bleeding and hurt and in distress. "Alicia, phone for an ambulance," I said. "Sam, can you -"

Sam put his finger on his lips to shush me, and widened his eyes. I shut up and _looked_.

Rosalind's face was … not Rosalind's face. It was blurred, melting, like something in a heat haze: flickering to something quite other, something that made me feel wrong and sick to see. Her body, too, was changing, growing shapeless, sagging like the speeded-up film of a decomposing corpse that had been doing the rounds in Forensics a year or so back.

"Pooka," murmured Sam softly, as if he were reminding us.

"Let me go," said Rosalind, and her voice, coming from that wrecked and wavering face, was her own again. "I'm lost … I've been lost so long ..."

Alicia, who had not moved from her huddle against the wall, put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. Rosalind crackled and squelched, and the rest of us barely breathed: there was a stench in the air, something strong and animal, and I wondered if this was what Jonathan Devlin had smelt, all those years ago. I wondered if this was what he had somehow summoned.

At last there was nothing left but long, curved sticks stripped of their bark; a handful of dry bronze leaves; and a pool of dark blood.

"I'm so sorry," said Rob to Alicia, who was still weeping helplessly next to the pile of rubbish that had pretended to be her daughter. "Let us -"

"Get out," said Alicia tonelessly. Then, her voice rising towards fury, "Get out, get _out_ , get _out_!"

* * *

Sam stayed behind, calm and unobtrusive, clearing up the remains: he came out of the house at last with a black rubbish bag in either hand, looking more solemn than I'd seen him for a long while. He dumped the bags in the bin at the end of Alicia Rowan's garden, and came over to where Rob and I were smoking. (I'd given up last year, but when Rob offered me a Marlboro I accepted without even thinking about it.)

"That's done, then," said Sam. He cleared his throat. "The bitch."

"D'you think she was really the pooka?" I said. Stupidly, I wanted to laugh and laugh: laugh at the idea that we'd confronted a monster out of folklore, laugh at the way she'd dissolved into leaf-shadow and dead wood, laugh at the way we were standing around chatting as though this were a normal day.

"Maybe Jonathan Devlin and his mates summoned something, that -" said Rob.

"I think she was a lost thing," said Sam firmly. "And long may she stay that way."

We stood there stealing glances at one another. I hoped Sam hadn't believed a word that Rosalind had said. I hoped Rob hadn't been too shattered by the cruel truths she'd flung at him. I hoped -

"You should come over for dinner," I said to Rob. "Saturday night, maybe? Bring some booze - none of that cheap shit, a decent white."

"We've a spare room," said Sam. "Bring your jim-jams and your toothbrush."

"On one condition," said Rob slowly.

"What's that, then?"

"Sam cooks: because I swear, Maddox, if I ever have to eat another of your burnt messes -"

And now it was all right to laugh, if I didn't think about Alicia Rowan mourning her daughter all over again: now it was all right for me to punch Rob lightly on the arm, for Sam to clasp his shoulder. Now we were safe.


	6. Epilogue

… and somewhere, the wood’s ghost waits for spring’s regrowth.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear novembersmith, I hope this fulfils at least some of the specifics of your request! This story burgeoned alarmingly and could have been twice as long ... thanks to the members of my (non-fanfic) writing group for helping me wrestle it into submission.


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